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Short Falls and Failures

An initial short fall of mine, was the inability to create a responsive design that worked consistently across each device. Designs that looked good on desktop and tablet devices appeared cramped and overloaded when transferred on to the mobile screen. If I were to approach this again I would design for the mobile first, as it is easier designing for larger screen resolutions, with more space to play around with. Ben Frain (2012, p.11) supports this notion stating,“A truly responsive methodology is actually more than merely altering the layout of a site based upon view port sizes. Instead, it is to invert our entire current approach to web design. (…) we should design for the smallest view port first and then progressively enhance the design and content for larger view ports.” The biggest design difficulty I had to overcome was deciding the best way to represent user’s opinions. When displayed below the films, this forced the layout to alter as not all comments were the same size and also took away from the clean minimalistic design I had created. The most appropriate alternative involved replacing the description with user’s comments when hovering over a film.

Another downfall of mine involved time keeping, as i failed to acknowledge the amount of time it would take to enter all the film content into the database. With a hundred or more films viewed at the festival and each needing a synopsis, several photos added to the image gallery, a trailer and list of actors, this proved a more arduous task than expected. With imminent deadlines, I needed to focus on designing the interface, so collaborated with Harriet to avoid wasting further time.

Despite all setbacks each short fall entailed, I believe they helped develop my design, coding and production management ability.